


gold coins to a cat

by LowDawn (EmpiricalBias)



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Ficlet Collection, Gen, Mental Illness, east asian sibling relationship(TM)
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-09-18
Updated: 2017-01-16
Packaged: 2018-08-15 16:16:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,079
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8063254
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/EmpiricalBias/pseuds/LowDawn
Summary: genji introspective, genji retrospective





	1. Age 25

Genji had always bruised the more easily out of the two of them. Always liked to rush in, take a step - not out of bounds but just beyond, just to _see_ \- past the line. Always liked meeting Hanzo and Hanzo's exasperated scowls somewhere in the thick of where he wasn't supposed to be, liked Hanzo trusting him to know where they stood (together, of course, together), even as he dragged him back to what he would grumble and growl was supposed to be 'his place.'

Hanzo had set the boundaries. Drawn the lines. Elder son to little brother. Two dragons to his single one. When they were young Genji had always let Hanzo gauze his injuries after sparring. Hanzo had only let him do the same after some amount of bickering - some amount of dancing close, then away, then closer still until Hanzo stopped snarling so much and remembered he could do that (trust him to know where his boundaries were).

"Idiot," Hanzo would snap, taping down a bandage running the whole length of Genji's arm with a vicious movement of his hands. Throwing a half-dozen pain-relief patches onto his brother's back as if he wants each one to injure. "Stop expecting me to hold back on you, it's pitiful." Hanzo back then had never said anything he didn't mean. "You look like a battered apple."

"Look who's talking," Genji would rebuff, terse and holding still for the last Salonpas and fairly itching for an argument, "already knowing which one of us always stops first. And anyway it'll take more than that to make me stay down, anija. You're just fucking lazy." He'd always ended up apologizing in the way of a younger sibling: by weathering the reprimanding that came after, tolerating the knuckles he got to his crown for being cheeky. Another line drawn, unspoken.

Two such lines stand out in his memory: Hanzo had trusted him, but he had not believed him. Not when Genji had claimed to hate him, at age seven. Not when Genji had said his hair looked stupid and no one would ever like him, at age twenty. Not even when, as a young adult, Genji had confessed he wanted to leave the clan, and began acting on those words - because he realized that he could, and that no one could really do anything to stop him, short of doling out punishment when he got caught.

Not even Hanzo.

Hanzo back then had held back. Had always found him and dragged him back to Hanamura castle every time he strayed too far, put in a good word with the elders, and trusted him; expected him to know where the lines were, expected him to stay in place ('his place'). And had never believed Genji's complaints.

The disbelief, like the trust, had chafed. The lines had gotten old. 

And Genji had, like always, taken a step.

Years later he remembers staring into the dragons' maws and thinking, as he bled into the ground, _fuck; that's going to bruise like hell._ And even then he'd still-- believed Hanzo, thought he'd known how this would end, because Hanzo had never believed him, never taken him seriously when he expressed his disdain for where they stood (because it was together, and what were they and the lines they'd drawn over and over and over if not together, to keep them there?).

It'd been easier than breathing to fall into line.

"It'll take," Genji had spat, remembering to bicker, "more than that," expecting his brother to disregard the words again, draw the boundaries anew, again, and go on the way they had.

But.

"Idiot," Hanzo had said, not snarling so much as breathing out his disappointment, driving his blade down.

Of all the times Hanzo could have chosen to believe him, Genji decides upon waking, it had to have been the worst.


	2. Age 11

The first time Genji's dragon manifests, he screams.

Hanzo shoots out of bed, alarmed-- but the night is dark and the air still, sullen with summer humidity and nothing so dangerous that warrants so much noise. After a moment, his fear sinks into irritation. "Genji."

Genji shrieks, writhing beside him; Hanzo yanks the covers away - almost asks him what's wrong, but then he realizes his brother is laughing so hard that no noise is coming out and tears have actually come to his eyes, and discards the last of his sympathy. 

He lays back down. "Genji," Hanzo repeats slowly, mustering all of the patience of a fifteen year old, "shut up."

" _You_ shut up!" Genji hisses, and kicks his sheets and Hanzo and the pillow Hanzo tries to smother him with off of his face so he can roll over.

Hanzo, annoyed at being woken and having a foot in his face on top of it, shoves him entirely off the bed.

" _Ow,_ " Genji wails, indignant. "Niichan you're a stinky piece of--"

A sliver of Hanzo's eye appears over the edge of the bed, challenge radiating. "What did you just call me?"

Genji is eleven.

Genji subsides.

"Anija," he corrects himself, at a more reasonable decibel.

"Sleep on the floor," Hanzo orders imperiously, dissatisfied, but turns back around when he hears Genji scramble to his knees and nearly tear his shirt pulling it over his head. "What the hell are you doing?"

Genji casts the shirt aside.

A hush falls over the brothers at the sight: faint, and vivid green, like reedy new grass by a riverbank; and so lithe its body wraps itself around its host's chest twice before pooling in the space behind his neck.

There it is. Genji's dragon.

"Genji's dragon!" Genji crows.

Hanzo climbs down from the bed, and kneels. Plants a hand over his sibling's shoulder and makes him lean one way, then the other. Genji bends, pliant in his grip. "It's on your back."

"My back? Yours is on your arm," Genji twists, watches his dragon try to rake through Hanzo's fingers over his shoulder with needle claws. "I can't see it."

"Quit whining. Right here," says the older brother, and traces the new shape that's sunk into the skin around Genji's spine with his fingers. He taps. "Tail." Moves up a measure, then presses lightly. "Body. Neck. It's floating out from here."

He gives it a cursory glance over. It's small. But like all dragons, it'll grow. Father will love it.

The elders... won't.

"Genjiii's draaagon," comes the encore, singsong and transparently pleased. "I'm a dragon now," Genji smirks.

Hanzo's palm collides with the back of Genji's head. The dragon tries to follow it, hissing; he gives it his best disapproving glare, feels the scales under his own skin stir in response. "You're not a dragon." 

"I'm a dragon," Genji pronounces, carding his fingers through the roots of his hair to feel at the sore spot - his dragon croons, retracts a little into his back. "Don't be jealous anija but I'm definitely gonna be a cooler dragon than you."

"I have two dragons." 

"I'll eat them."

His eyes practically roll themselves. "You can't do that."

"Then I'll have three dragons, and I'll be the _coolest_."

"Shut up and go to sleep, you're annoying." While Genji makes a pretzel of himself trying to see his own back, Hanzo goes for his handheld. A quick message to the right people makes sure no one is going to walk into his room assuming one of them is dead.

After giving himself a beat to think about it, he sends a separate text off to their parents.

Done. Hanzo nets the discarded shirt from the floor, half a mind to make Genji go without - and halts in the middle of throwing it, doing a double take. "This is  _my_ shirt."

"You can keep it. I look cooler naked now."

"Sleep on the floor naked then," Hanzo replies, sliding back into bed. Trying not to think about what tomorrow is going to bring for his little brother and his brother’s little dragon.

Genji collides with him in the middle of the mattress, and rolls over the covers in lieu of fighting him for them. 

"Do you want to die," Hanzo growls, but the words don't have much bite. He is tired. Life has become infinitely more complicated in the span of all of five sleepless minutes. Three dragons between the two of them?

Things are going to change.

Genji huffs and rolls away, heeding the warning.

Hanzo closes his eyes. Tommorrow, he and Father will figure this out. For now he can rest a little longer. 

...Right after he heaves an enormous sigh, and sits up to pull the bedcovers into a semblance of order. Without opening his eyes he open-hand punches both pillows into shape by feel, and shifts to the far side of the bed before laying back down.

They end up back-to-back. Like they always do.

"You don't scare me. Dragons don't die," Genji assures him, burying a grin into his pillow.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> lowered their ages by a bit, because my brothers may be hellions but they were tiny hellions if i remember correctly.
> 
> do the brothers have official birthdays? A headcanon: genji was born late in the year and hanzo earlier, so it's an almost-4-year gap instead of just a flat 3.


	3. Age 30

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> content warning for dissociation, depersonalization, unreality.

Dead of winter, in Japan.

Even in late December Hanamura’s flowers refuse to pale, yielding nothing to the snow. His footsteps crunch where they don’t slip, and where they slip the grips on the bottoms of a new set of ice-resistant soles prevent the body from suffering a fall.

The wind whistles. The snow whispers. Sometimes Genji thinks he can hear a heartbeat, if he lets the cold seep in too long - through the cracks in the body’s armor, through the panels that shield the ribs - but only sometimes. Not always. 

It's midnight, the tail end of the second year he’s spent in Overwatch as an active agent; and nearly all of those thousands of hours have seen him in or around his hometown. His only given objective is, still, to bring down his former family. He shares it with the machine that encases him.

The specifics change as he sees fit. Tapping calls, leaking intel, compromising safehouses and key personnel. Right this moment he's three weeks into unearthing a certain trafficking operation - it’s a relatively recent setup, partially in reaction to his meddling, but the Shimadas have sunk a significant investment into this new hydra’s head. Its operatives are paranoid and well-trained. Years and years of experience each under the guidance of his father’s era, rooted deep.

He’ll make sure it does them no good.

His clan, great beast it once was, is beginning to feel the thorn in its side; with Hanzo newly vanished they’ve become insular, self-destructive, scattered. Less stable but also less vulnerable. It’s a particularly difficult form of that monster he faces now, as itpools its resources and rears its ugly and desperate maw. But Genji is not the prodigal son and his family is eager to welcome him the only way they know how - with bullets and blood, lies and a lifetime of sharp, cutting things - and so he brings destruction with him on every return trip, raining down ruin like the current of a cold, unyielding river (slowly, slowly, and then all at once). 

Hanamura is the same. The flowers continue to bloom and so does the fog of his machinations continue to accumulate, shielding him from his cage. Breath escapes from its vents. Light emits from its heart. Genji accompanies the body like a shadow, fluid and unhesitating, as it goes through the motions. It is almost easy now.

But in the dead of winter, in the dead of night, amidst a fresh dusting of white over Hanamura’s frozen groves and a chill deep enough for it to needle, a child’s face enters his field of vision.

The boy can’t have been more than three years old. His countenance is all baby fat and innocent curiosity, a cold-fever flush over the cheeks. Genji doesn’t know what does it - the hair, maybe; or the set of the o-shaped mouth that gives away everything that isn’t reflected in the equally round eyes, maybe? He hasn’t caught the boy’s attention, he realizes; the boy has arrested his. They both stare, lingering too long - a snowflake dashes itself on the seam of the machine’s visor and Genji blinks as if it’s his own eye.

Genji blinks, as if it’s his own eye.

The snowflake doesn’t move. Beyond it is the boy, who keeps his tiny eyes on him as the family turns the corner, child nestled securely in a parent’s arms. Genji keeps blinking, and the motion feels as sharp as it does involuntary. His vision warps, narrows, elongates, and then rights itself. A humidity warning alights just as something warm rolls down his cheeks.

He reaches up to wipe it away, and startles. There is metal where he expected skin.

All of a sudden he is acutely aware of the cold on his fingertips.

Genji stands. Veers on his heel as if compelled, forces the legs to leap off the nearest rooftop - changes direction mid-air by a single burst from the boosters in the augments in the back that he can’t remember learning to use. Twenty steps and a climb _that_ way take him lightly down a frost-dusted alleyway and into a side street, and twelve steps the other put him in a shallow dead-end backlot behind a dormant restaurant. Closed for the night. The body heaves, around him.

Snow is gathered on his fingers when he looks. He curls each individual one into the fist; snowflakes fall away from the joints, the deep crevices carved out of the knuckles and wrist that shine like the bones of an omnic. He watches the mechanism move, feels bile rising somewhere far away, and his body--

His body shudders, gut clutching painfully as it recalls itself; Genji staggers to the side, finds himself instinctively (uselessly) facing the garbage and reaches for the release latch to his faceplate. The switches depress on either side of his head with a hiss.

His stomach remembers how to retch, even if there’s nothing in it it can purge. Even so, there are no nerve endings affixed to his elbows yet. The armor on his shins and knees likewise make no note of the cold kiss of the ground.

Someone from local headquarters tries to hail him as he writhes. Probably one or more of his internal monitors had tripped a cautionary alarm in medical. He fires back an all-clear and cuts the line from his end by nonverbal command, before he has the time to think about how that is even possible.

He drags himself to his hands - if he makes a noise like wailing it’s swallowed by the wind and the cavern of his throat, tongue steeped in metal and blood in his sterile mouth. His lungs scream for air, and burn when he gives it to them, rewarding him with stinging saline stabs in his eyes for the trouble. A sad consolation prize.

The machine simply breathes; machines don’t get sick.

Machines don't cry.

When he can no longer stand the sound of harsh, desperate gasping, or the pounding in his ears, he reaches for the visor.

_A spray of blood litters his upper arm and pauldron as he steps hard into the draw of his wakizashi; the man, a lynchpin in this sector’s trafficking ring, slips on his own viscera by the momentum of his downfall and Genji wonders dully if he had practiced that in a training simulation in Zürich before or if it had just been a stray thought floating untethered until he put it into motion—_

The seams of his segmented helm fit together like teeth in a metal jaw, sealing him inside with a click and a condemning whirr. The inner atmosphere stabilizes; the wetness on his face wicks away.

_—just once he makes the mistake of purposefully looking at the faces of his victims (to his blade and the undiscerning rage of his dragon they are simply flesh like all else and distantly he recalls that it had bothered him before) and finds recognition, but it is a single lifeless note in the fractured, tempestuous chorus of his consciousness; even the disquiet that had flashed in his mind briefly during the weeks he devoted to personally gutting the ranks of Shimada security fails to make itself present—_

He makes it to his feet, somehow, eventually. 

_—training becomes easier when he remembers that his abilities used to be mechanical, at least in movement and memory translated to action, and he leans hard on the deep cushion of detachment that he used to call on whenever father would send him out for the quieter eliminations - murders that required more personal involvement from him than he liked but he’d made a game of it like he’d done everything else - in order to bolster his efficiency; the fog billows thick from the well of his mind where he keeps his games when he discovers it serves him so, so well the days he has to be taken apart for repairs—_

There’s a message waiting in his inbox when he reactivates the comms, which gives him pause. He responds politely to the concern he reads between the lines; Angela’s pleasantries are nothing if not genuine.

Comforting in their predictability.

_—his body, or what's left of it, is—_

A snowflake falls into his line of sight.

_—is...—_

Genji blinks.

It's quiet.

(Hadn't it always been quiet?)

The sky is the color of steel wool. Dead of winter, in Japan, he remembers. The snow is falling in a fine powder. There was something he was doing, he thinks; he moves, and the legs do not falter. That’s good.

The shuriken reload seamlessly into the right wrist at a flick of the arm, and a weight check confirms that it has reset properly. He notes the internal temperature reading is a little low. It’s nothing the trek back to rendezvous won’t address.

Good.

The wind blows past, buffeting snow and petals, but does not touch him; cannot touch him. The body, titanium alloy and artificial muscle, only registers the winter chill as the slightest of stiffness in the smaller joints. He clambers up the gates of his childhood home and does not slip. The new soles are working flawlessly. He'll have to send his regards to the engineer.

Genji grasps his blade without feeling the hilt, again profiling the people that wander beneath him with a dispassionate eye. He recognizes his mark when he sees it.

Flowers are blooming in the old courtyard. It's easy to leap past without looking.

He wonders what Hanzo is up to these days.


End file.
